[Olpc-open] RE: [mass storage] Is it possible to substitute flash?

[Khaled Hassounah]

Xavier,

Xavier Alvarez wrote:
> Talking about 'school servers'... where can I find information 
> about it? Do plans exist?

There will be a school server. The plans are not finalized yet, but they
will be small, power-efficient, inexpensive, and serve two purposes:
mass-storage/backup and network routing for outside and intra-school
connectivity.

> Or more mundane: how will the kid browse his backups? a-la *nix? 
> or a more user-friendly way integrated into Sugar? Imagine in 
> AbiWord something like: 'sorry, the file you try to edit is 
> stored in the school-server, do you want to retrieve it?'. Or it 
> could automagically recover it? What if memory is not enough? 
> Will things be (again) automagically uploaded to the server to 
> free space?
> 
> Politically, and here I'm assuming, governments should KNOW about 
> the extra costs that they will incur into. We are talking of 
> important chunks of their educational budgets here, we don't want 
> it to fall due to 'but that was obvious, wasn't it?' kind of 
> excuses...
This will be a very small percentage of the overall cost, specifically
less than $1 per child, and they do know about them.
> 
> Those two things together could also work to the project's 
> advantage.  For example, teacher WILL be a major part of the 
> equation (in many places on the wrong side - read, liability). 
> With a school server, you can start luring teachers and 
> administrators by providing software capable of running or 
> administering the school (attendance, grades, accounting, etc). 
> You give them tools, they'll be more open (even desperate) to get 
> into the project...

I think kids will be a larger part of the equation, both in numbers and
capabilities.